Advancing Privacy on the Web with Let's Encrypt™

Anthony Eden— 01 May 2020

DNSimple turns ten this year, and we're celebrating by building a better Internet, together. In honor of our tenth anniversary, we've put together a Pay-it-Forward initiative supporting non-profit organizations who foster a free and open Internet. We'd love it if you'd join us.

To kick things off, we're donating 10% of every new yearly Personal, Professional, and Business plan subscription payment to Let's Encrypt for a limited time. We'll even give you two months free, just for signing up.

As a champion of the free and open internet, Let's Encrypt does essential work to create a more privacy-respecting Web. As a non-profit, they rely solely on donations to operate.

It's impossible to overstate the incredible work Let's Encrypt does. By making HTTPS certificates free and easy to install, they've made encryption and privacy more accessible for everyone. Since launching in 2015, they've issued more certificates than all other certificate authorities combined. They've truly made the Internet a better place to be.

The work Let's Encrypt does is huge. And we can all help improve Internet privacy. It starts with you securing your site with a Let's Encrypt certificate using DNSimple's domain management tools and integration. Join us in helping make the Internet better for everyone.

What is Let's Encrypt?

Let's Encrypt is dedicated to creating a more secure and privacy-respecting Web by issuing the digital certificates needed for sites to secure their network traffic.

– Josh Aas, ISRG Executive Director

Let's Encrypt is a free, automated, open certificate authority from the non-profit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). They provide TLS (Transport Layer Security) certificates to 200 million websites, and champion Internet privacy worldwide.

Automated: Let's Encrypt developed a new issuance protocol called ACME that's designed to be fully automated with no manual intervention.

Open: The source code of Let's Encrypt certification authority and the ACME protocol is open source and available in GitHub.

Like Let's Encrypt, we're firm believers in improving privacy for everyone on the Web. DNSimple has been integrating with Let's Encrypt for four years and contributing to their fundraising campaign since 2018.

On board from the start

With billions of people using the Internet every day, it's critical that the websites people visit are secured with HTTPS. From 2017 - 2020, global HTTPS page loads increased from 58% to 81%. The world is trending toward better privacy, and DNSimple has been there to integrate as much as possible.

We've invested a lot in HTTPS over the years. We first integrated with Let's Encrypt in 2016, allowing you to easily request an SSL certificate for free using the Let's Encrypt certification authority – without any manual work. We use DNS-based validation to automatically validate the domain's owner, so you don't need to approve any emails or intervene manually. You can use our API to automate the administration of your Let's Encrypt certificates. And we include non-wildcard Let's Encrypt certificates in all our plans.

Beyond financial support and integration, we've dedicated time to creating informative content, so everyone can understand the importance of HTTPS and how it works. We even made a comic - howhttps.works

Integrating Let's Encrypt with DNSimple

We're one of the best platforms out there for integrating with Let's Encrypt, because (like with everything we do) we make it as simple as possible.

With Let's Encrypt, we fully automate the request, validation, and renewal of SSL certificates, so you have fewer things to worry about for your domains. If you're on a Professional plan or higher, we also support Let's Encrypt Wildcard certificates - you can read more about those in this post.

Our work doesn't stop there. We fire webhooks when a certificate is renewed, so you can even automate the installment of the certificate within your infrastructure. You don't have to worry about changes or new versions of the ACME protocol. We take care of everything, and provide all this information within our DNSimple API v2 – the same simple-to-use API you use to automate the management of your domains.

How we're giving back

To help create a more secure and privacy-respecting Web, we're donating a portion of every new yearly subscription payment (Personal, Professional, and Business) to Let's Encrypt, and giving you two months free.

Here's how it works:

Sign up for a new yearly Personal, Professional, or Business plan subscription with DNSimple.

You'll get two months free - just for signing up.

We'll automatically donate 10% of every yearly subscription payment started during this campaign. You don't need to opt-in, and we won't charge you extra for the donation. It's a win-win.

Supporting a more privacy-respecting internet doesn't get any easier than this.